Cycles noise no matter what I do, and the denoiser makes it look cloudy
Denoising works well only at high resolutions, in my experience from 4k. Try putting more samples, or increasing the resolution and using denoising. I rendered a scene with different light sources on 512 samples.
In addition, you can see examples of different samples and noise effect here Will increasing samples reduce fireflies?

1000:1000px; 128 samples and denoising.

1500:1500px; 256 samples and desoising on compositing tab.
As far as I know, sometimes denoising in the compositing tab, for some reason, works differently than in setting the view layers :)